iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Kevin

New open-access paper: Direct File showed that govt could build its own user-centered platform without relying on contractors. But the product was killed after a DOGE lead spoke with the private tax preparation industry lobbying against a private option. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

The ability of governments to build and sustain public interest capacity partly depends upon the position of private interests, and the ability and willingness of a government to resist private interest opposition.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) built a digital tax reporting service, Direct File, that created significant public value for users.
Direct File depended upon the creation of internal capacity: a government digital service team that could build digital platforms, rather than procuring a product from private vendors. Government control of the process allowed agile development and iterative improvement that would have been impossible under a traditional outsourcing model.
Long-standing opposition to Direct File by the private tax preparation industry, combined with Trump-era downsizing by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led to the elimination of the tool.

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Kevin @doubleohkevin.bsky.social · 1h

🤦I should have kept reading lol bsky.app/profile/epic...

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Kevin @doubleohkevin.bsky.social · 1h

Agreed. Strong Gregory Peck vibes from Ossoff. You can imagine him playing Peck’s part in To Kill A Mockingbird

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Kelsey J.R.P. Byers @plantpollinator.bsky.social · 6h

Friend pointed out that if your dog goes and harms someone, you can be held criminally liable for the actions of the dog. So why can't we hold AI companies criminally liable for the actions of their "AI" agents, e.g. providing false evidence to the police, hacking government and corporate systems?

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Kevin @doubleohkevin.bsky.social · 6h

This is the US picking the side of Russia in their war of aggression against Ukraine. Shameful day, among a decade of shameful days.

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Abdul El-Sayed @abdulelsayed.bsky.social · 23h

Blue Cross Blue Shield is being sued as a monopoly after the state found it's been in a conspiracy to restrict access to healthcare. Corporations should not have this much power. We need money out of politics, money in our pockets, and Medicare for All.

freep.com

Michigan attorney general sues Blue Cross, alleging illegal monopoly

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel sued Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan in "arguably the most consequential antitrust case" of its kind.

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Anil Dash @anildash.com · 20h

The thing I’ll say, having been an advisor for the Obama admin, and chairing the tech council for his foundation, this is *exactly* how he asked us to carry things out where we disagreed. He always asked us to build on the work & do *better*, and strongly supported folks taking that exact approach.

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Noah Berlatsky @nberlat.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

the funniest thing here is it's not even his main point. it's just a casual backhand as he thumps him for supporting data centers.

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Jason Koebler @jasonkoebler.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

this is the funniest thing i've seen in a looooong time. city passes new rule allowing prayer before city council meetings. satanist prays. city council then debates proper time to "undo the curse that was just put on our city" www.404media.co/it-is-done-h...

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Kevin @doubleohkevin.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Socialism is whatever we say it is. Pickles in ice cream? Socialism. Blue haired women? Also socialism.

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Kevin @doubleohkevin.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

No, eat it. It’s fine. It’s probably even delicious

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Kevin @doubleohkevin.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I’ve seen people say you can just skip the review part. But you can’t, you only move it to production. Which means the process of, say, fixing a bug will be even slower than it would have been if the review was done pre-prod.

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Kevin @doubleohkevin.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

The assumption you make is that reviews will get shorter. But the problem is that reviews scale with code. So even if you have shorter review cycles, you get more code which generates more reviews, erasing productivity gains.

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Kevin @doubleohkevin.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

This thinking assumes that a software’s design is complete, and therefore all that’s left is to put together the pieces. In reality, there isn’t a “final design”. Each line of code is *part* of the design. The assembly is when software compiles and runs.

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Kevin @doubleohkevin.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

The pertinent section of the essay for me is when Naur dismisses those who think software is something like an industrial line, and the developer is essentially an replaceable assembler on the line.

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ve, the ghost of info past @vortexegg.com · 08/10/2026

Ultimately the problem is that you can’t scale up the social activity of theory building by either adding more people to the set of people who need to understand the theory, or automating the increasing surface of theory to be understood because collective knowledge has inverse scaling frictions.

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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Software engineering could and should be done with the same care as any other type of engineering. This is a post in honor of Margaret Hamilton (and also a subtweet of all vibe-coders everywhere).

Screencap

"“I fought to bring the software legitimacy so that it — and those building it — would be given its due respect, and thus I began to use the term ‘software engineering’ to distinguish it from hardware and other kinds of engineering, yet treat each type of engineering as part of the overall systems engineering process,” Hamilton told El Pais in 2018. “When I first started using this phrase, it was considered to be quite amusing. It was an ongoing joke for a long time. They liked to kid me about my radical ideas. Software eventually and necessarily gained the same respect as any other discipline.”"

Source: https://news.mit.edu/2026/margaret-hamilton-computing-pioneer-dies-1007

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Mad Scholar Frights @mattzollerseitz.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Nothing but respect for MY Digger

Publicity photo of William H. Macy as The Shoveler, a superhero from 1999 film
Mystery Men who actually doesn't have any superpowers, but he is very handy with a shovel. He is a clean shaven, middle-age white man wearing a yellow hard hat with a miner's lamp on it, a black protective vest with red trimming, a brown leather jacket, and thick black protective gloves.

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Butlerian Jihadist of House Dornick @shimminykricket.blacksky.app · 08/10/2026

Harvard just dropped a study AI productivity in software engineering and it found the average increase in productivity from using Claude code is.....zero and for exactly the reasons you'd think fion.ac/jellyfish.pdf

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Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Most people oppose ant-democratic practices, but a fair number of people are neutral about them. New research (N > 48,000) finds that neutrality is a threat to democracy--this large segment of the public tolerates anti-democratic elites www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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Kevin @doubleohkevin.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I try to put myself in their shoes. Mostly because I cannot fathom being someone who says that. I’ve concluded that it’s a form of neuroticism, like chewing your fingernail

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Bookshop.org @bookshop.org · 06/10/2026

Anti-Prime Day starts…NOW! 🥳 Today through midnight on 10/7, enjoy free shipping site-wide, all while supporting local, independent bookstores.

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The Tennessee Holler @thetnholler.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

JON STEWART: “So in the FUTURE we WILL use A.I. to cure diseases… but right now it’s mostly murder, surveillance, and surge pricing for the McRib — What a trade! I’m getting the sense you guys might be full of shit.”

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Dave Karpf @davekarpf.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I'm just gonna bookmark this for future reference when Dem pundits complain about how the party has trouble communicating its message to voters. The reason you keep running into trouble with your branding isn't campus radicals. The reason is that your opponents purchased all the media outlets.

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Kevin @doubleohkevin.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

It’s genuinely amazing to see a show destroy all that built-up goodwill so quickly. Never seen anything like it

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Dr Dean Burnett @drdeanburnett.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

"By using AI, tasks like essays that used to take hours can be completed in minutes!" Sure, like how if I arrive at the gym and immediately go for a shower, my workout is done in record time. And if I throw my sandwiches straight in the bin, I can finish my lunch in under 10 seconds.

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Haydon, frightfully @haydonmp.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

This is categorically insane and I understand why active duty folks are willing to put their name on it. This is so beyond the pale of unacceptable.

Soldiers helped save each other after Iranian attack
After the deadly drone strike, soldiers, who are equipped with tourniquets and trained in first aid, tended to each other and then searched on Google to race the wounded to the nearest hospital in Kuwait City about 20 minutes away.

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Steve Mullis @stevemullis.net · 05/10/2026

[car dealership waiting room] Me: [chanting] knobs, knobs- Other car buyers: knobs, KNOBS Car salesman: [pounding desk] KNOBS, KNOBS, KNOBS!

forbes.com

Knobs Returning To Some Automakers’ Vehicles, To The Relief Of Many

Auto companies are listening to the complaints of consumers, who want their knobs and buttons back.

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I Scare You Like Sound Dog @chadstanton.blacksky.app · 05/10/2026

My mother got certified in cosmetology and that’s part of how she was able to raise my three brothers and I. These people are assholes who experience the world solely through “takes” hinging on misogyny and the like.

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Kevin J. Kircher @kevinjkircher.com · 05/10/2026

We're in the middle of a race to the bottom, where authors use LLMs to generate more and more proposals, so funders use LLMs to screen proposals to keep up with increasing submission volumes. At some level of "LLMs evaluating LLM-generated submissions," you've gotta ask what we're even doing here.

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Kevin @doubleohkevin.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Feel like we can’t talk about Biden and Lula without addressing the gerontocracy problem in modern politics

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Coach Finstock @coachfinstock.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Exactly. This is such a lie. Email had a purpose. The internet had a purpose. Search had a purpose. Everybody loved Silicon Valley in the 90s because they made shit that did what it promised. Now 3 guys who never made SHIT have ALL the money in SV. They're scam artists. Not engineers.

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Kevin @doubleohkevin.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

The Last Man is the dude in the basement

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Micah @rincewind.run · 04/10/2026

man I would like one fucking electorate - one! - to remember that fascism is bad for more than five minutes at a time

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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Creating art. If Andy Warhol were still alive, he'd be making silkscreens of this interaction that people could hang on their walls.

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Kevin @doubleohkevin.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

lol this is such cope. i remember when the iphone launched. people couldn't wait to get their hands on it. who is doing that for ai? what even is the product?

a chart by a16z showing potential explosive growth for ai even though ai only has 2.2% adoption among the public. someone responds saying that various other things shot up in adoption like cars, internet, computers, phones

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Matt Hodges @matthodges.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

There's growing experimental evidence¹˒²˒³˒⁴ that LLMs are unusually good at talking people out of entrenched false beliefs and conspiracy theories. ¹ pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39264999/ ² pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41179846/ ³ sciety.org/articles/act... ⁴ connecticut.adl.org/resources/re...

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Matt @tiredgenerally.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

yes it does? the whole modern state was built in like a few years

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Edward Hopper @edwardhopper.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

People in the Sun (1960) depicts sunbathers aligned in geometric deck chairs on a hotel sun deck. Their posture echoes sundial shadows. The work connects his late-career refinement of modernist geometries with his interest in 1960s travel culture.

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Matt Thiessen @mattthiessen.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

your daily reminder that the field of religious studies remains relevant. In fact, it is increasingly relevant.

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Kevin @doubleohkevin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Trent Reznor. Tbh we got a taste of it with old town road since it uses a NIN sample

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Sam (ABeardedPanda) @abeardedpanda.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

WWII-era OSS shit is so funny because half of it is the blueprints of modern espionage practices and the other half is postgraduates cooking up the whackiest shit imaginable because it might give the nazis a bad time

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